Harry Owens – Academy Award Musician, Composer & Band Leader (1902 – 1986)

Missoula-Reared Musician Hailed In Hollywood for Recent Showing

The flood of Hawaiian music sweeping through the nation just now can be traced directly to a Missoula-reared orchestra leader, credited in Hollywood with being responsible for the revival of tunes from the islands. He is Harry Owens, who first played in an orchestra here, about 20 years ago, when he was just 14 years old. He later played in the orchestra of Tom and Phil Sheridan.

Owens, now 34, started his career while attending Loyola high school here. His father, J. M. Owens, for many years was superintendent of schools at Hamilton, and is well known here, where the family resided for years.

Harry Owens went to the coast about 12 years ago, and within two years was making a name for himself as a director and composer. Going to Honolulu, he now claims as his home, he became a musical historian, writing down more than 50 Hawaiian folk songs which had never been put on paper before.

Sharing the spotlight with him is his daughter, Leilani, the inspiration for “Sweet Leilani,” the outstanding song hit of 1937.

Owens makes his first movie appearance in “Cocoanut Grove,” for which his entire band was brought to the mainland from Hawaii. He also wrote three songs for the picture and scored the music for the entire production. He composes with amazing speed, claiming he can turn out a “song an hour.”

The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on May 30, 1938.

A Mini bio for Harry Owens can be found at the IMDb website:

One of the foremost exponents of Hawaiian music, Harry Owens arrived in the islands in 1934 and became quickly enamored with the local scene. Owens had been a straight trumpet player in Los Angeles dance bands (at the Ambassador Hotel Cocoanut Grove and for Vincent Rose). His previous experience as a leader dated back to 1926, when he fronted a band at the Lafayette Cafe in L.A.. His song “Aloha Oe” was heard by the manager of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, who asked Owens to establish a house orchestra at his resort. Owens obliged, and, abandoning western-style music, totally embraced Hawaiian culture — music in particular — transcribing many traditional songs for the first time. He was also instrumental in popularising the steel guitar. Owens took his ‘Royal Hawaiians’, with regular vocalists Hilo Hattie and Alfred Apaka, on several successful tours of the U.S. West Coast. This included a return to his old haunt at the Cocoanut Grove and engagements at the Mural Room of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Owens made prolific recordings for Decca, Capitol and Columbia and enjoyed being regularly showcased on the radio show ‘Hawaii Calls’ (from 1935, complete with ocean sounds emanating from Waikiki Beach for added authenticity) and had his own show on CBS television from 1949 to 1958.

His most famous composition and signature song was “Sweet Leilani” (inspired by the birth of his daughter), crooned by Bing Crosby, which won the Oscar for Best Song, after being featured in the film Waikiki Wedding (1937). It remained top of the charts for twenty-eight weeks and has sold more than twenty million copies to date. Among more than 300 songs written or transcribed by Owens are such popular compositions as “Voice of the Trade Winds”, “Blue Shadows and White Gardenias”, “Linger Awhile”, “Hawaii Calls” and “Polynesian Holiday”. Owens was also credited with helping to reinvigorate the tourist industry in Hawaii. In 1987, he was honoured with the Na Hoku Hanohano Lifetime Achievement Award, bestowed by the Hawai’i Academy of Recording Arts (HARA), a year after his death at the age of eighty-four.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis

An obituary for Harry Owens appeared in the L.A. Times on December 13, 1986 – see link below:

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-12-13/news/mn-2448_1_harry-owens

Harry Owens In Action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91lgkx83aQQ

Won Academy award in 1938 for the following song

Sweet Leilani by Bing (Became friend Crosby’s 1^st gold record)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_Kym-TTbV0

Modern – Sweet Leilani by Chris Isaak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEtLjFXFvLQ

https://www.newspapers.com/image/349200366